Good Schools or Good Students?: Evidence on School Effects from Universal Random Assignment of Students to High Schools

Julian P. Cristia, Paulo Bastos, Kim Beomsoo and Ofer Malamud

No 12394, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: How much do schools differ in their effectiveness? Recent studies that seek to answer this question account for student sorting using random assignment generated by central allocation mechanisms or oversubscribed schools. However, the resulting estimates, while causal, may also reflect peer effects due to differences in peer quality of non-randomized students. We exploit universal random assignment of students to high schools in certain areas of South Korea to provide estimates of school effects that may better reflect the effects of school practices. We find significant effects of schools on scores in high-stakes college entrance exams: a 1 standard deviation increase in school quality leads to 0.06-0.08 standard deviations higher average academic achievement in Korean and English languages. Analogous estimates from areas of South Korea that do not use random assignment, and therefore include the effects of student sorting and peer effects, are substantially higher.

Keywords: School effects; Universal random assignment; Peer effects; School inputs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-net and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... -to-high-schools.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:12394

DOI: 10.18235/0004380

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().